Tuesday, April 28, 2015

There's a Black man on YouTube who has a lot of very critical things to say about his peeps. And he rants on and on, even worse than ExC. Yes, sir, he does. In the middle of a video about a college football player killing his sexual playmate after discovering she was a he, we got some advice for the "LGBT whatever community. What's at all mean, anyways, y'all LGBT s? Bacon Lettuce and Tomato?"

LMAO!

I like that. I think from now on I'm gonna refer to the BLT community.

Monday, April 27, 2015

Given the Potemkin Village that the media constructs and lives in, I fail to find it surprising that he would do this. After all, he's a Straight White Male. And I find it very amusing that the minions of Pravda West, for whom The Narrative always overrides mere "fact", suddenly care about "accuracy."

And I will confess that I have always had, on seeing and hearing Mr Williams, with his faux gravitas, an urge to punch him in the mouth and tell him to shut up.

Two ideas that make Buddhism both necessary and possible are karma and reincarnation. Without the absolutely inflexible regime of karma, where every deed is a cause that creates a corresponding moral effect, and reincarnation, where "you" are endlessly returned to yet another life of suffering, there would be no motive for seeking extinction through moral effort.

Yet these two ideas are, to me, impossible to take seriously. The idea of a universal moral order that is not personal makes no sense to me. And the mechanism by which either a soul (in Hinduism) or a bundle of karmic debts (in Buddhism) is grafted from one physical form into another...well, by what magic does that work?

As a psychological asceticism, Buddhism has much to commend it. How much human misery does indeed come from being attached to what is impossible. But as a religious description of how man and the world actually function? Unbelievable.

For some reason, a lot of post-Christian Westerners who recoil at the notion of a personal Deity making specific moral demands on them, demand which have consequences beyond this life, find it acceptable to talk about "the Universe" teaching them lessons and dishing out consequences. As if that is either intellectually or aesthetically better.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Another gorgeous spring morning, the sun brightly shining, the trees and shrubs and flowers, the people out with their dogs, the sweet Pacific air. Strong hot coffee. Very nice indeed.

My take on groups and on individuals within groups is always different. It's not an achievement of mine, just a feature. Always been that way. Example. My assessment of the African-in-America population as a group has taken a huge nosedive over the last several years. But my longstanding connection with my Black ex remains. He is not a group. I call it The In-Law Position: loving your spouse does not necessarily mean loving their family. (He treats me the same way, mostly.)

And here's an individual in that group whose appearance cannot but strike me as very impressive indeed.

Yup, green eyes.

Mormon theology continues to fascinate. The LDS have no real Creator God because the universe is eternal and uncreated, composed of matter and intelligence, always. Gods evolve out of it (by Darwinian super/natural selection?), organize it and enliven it, but do not create it, as with the monotheist religions, from nothing. A strangely materialist inversion of Gnostic themes.

Mormons get very defensive about their exclusion of Blacks from the priesthood til the 70's. Politically, it's a liability and was tactically done away with by "revelation" just like polygamy was when it became too hot to handle. But in terms of what any priesthood is, not a problem. Despite the Protestant "priesthood of all believers" and its reduction and democratization of sacred power into mere talking and universality, any priesthood worth its archetypal salt is exclusive by nature. In Judaism, it was inherited by blood, like royalty. There is really no difference --except on a contemporary political level-- between excluding a gender and excluding a race from priestly power. An exclusive status is "owed" to nobody. And once everyone can have it, it's not all that desirable.

Bruce Jenner has turned out to be very disappointing for the folks that were all ready to make him into an icon for America's latest liberationist fetish group, the 3/1000ths that may be gender dysphoric. He revealed, oh the horror, that he's a Republican conservative. The vitriol exploded, in print and in pixel. That's what happens when Official Victims wander off the plantation.

And really, what madness is not to be expected when they marry into the Kardashians?

Reading a book by a Very Far Right guy with no love for Christianity and its egalitarian moral universalism, I was surprised and amused that he used the Roman Catholic Church's governance structure as a good model for a future post-American nation: a non-hereditary meritocracy of sorts, with elements of both monarchy and aristocracy. He also likes Venice's old complex republican set-up, which worked amazingly well for 1000 years.

Friday, April 24, 2015

The religions of this world are either repellent or boring. None are convincing. GRR Martin might well have followed the lead of JRR Tolkien's Fellowship stories and left religion out of it altogether.

Two good lines about this, though:

Tyrion the Dwarf: "The Drowned God wants men drowned, the Fire God wants men burned. Why are all the gods such vicious cunts?" *

A pious son asking a wise relative about his irreverent father: "But doesn't father believe in the gods?" Answer: "Yes, he believes in them. He just doesn't like them very much."

The same-sex stuff is shown unsentimentally. It is tolerated if kept private, but not respected. Not treated with PC sensitivity, although both the boy-loving eunuch Lord Varis and the homosexual royal pretender Renly Baratheon are portrayed as more decent than most of the men in Westeros.

As is pretty well everything else, although girl-power infects the show too much, with the usual litany of complaints.

Arya Stark is a royal pain in the ass and not at all interesting. Endlessly one-note oppositional/defiant brat girls hold no appeal in fiction. The real world is already too full of them. All the Starks, come to think of it, grow boring fast, with the self-righteous stubbornness. Lannisters, though/because evil, are much more compelling.

Lord Littlefinger Baelish and Jaime Lannister are nasty men, but I kinda like them. You never quite know what they're up to.

The blond queen slave emancipator with the dragons is stiff and morally pompous except when out of control. Only then does she become a little interesting.

The series is about complex plot development and surprise, not about character. Most of the characters are flat, narrow or repellent and one-dimensional.

But the dwarf is the most interesting of all. His is really the only one whose death would move me.

Well, negatively. Little King Joffrey is written entirely to be loathed and at that the series works well. When he does die, it's entirely too swiftly. He deserves the fate that Theon Greyjoy got.

Like House of Cards, though, it is unblinking about human nature. More often than not it is Eros who provokes the missteps that eventually bring the characters down.

---
*GoT has an abundance of vicious cunts, of the human variety, Cersei Lannister not alone among them . GRR Martin is a violently anti-Republican ideologue in real life, but like all liberals, he can only make interesting art by adopting a conservative view of human nature.

When you break down the performance of "American" students into racial groups, interesting trends emerge.

Race, as we know, is a completely fictitious and pernicious social construct, you H8ful racist bigot, and the most important thing in the whole wide world, you H8ful racist bigot.

HT to FreeNortherner.

Now, as part of my nice day, I'm gonna go out and wash my car and get it ready for the girl who's rented it for the weekend, making me $77. She rented it a few weeks ago for $80 but left a dent over the driver door handle. I passed on pix to Getaround and they are giving me $125 for that. I have a bit of a cosmetic dent, but she's made me $282. So I forgave her. See? Who says I can't be caring and compassionate?

When it comes to human origins, liberals are Darwinian fundamentalists. Evolution via natural selection, absent any hint of a spiritus rector, is the required POV for admission to polite society.

When it comes to human actualities, however, "equality!" And actual evidence be damned. Equality, the counterfactual status of which is evident to anyone who can unblind themselves to the mantras, must be chanted endlessly, lest the actual consequences of Darwin be revealed.

And as I have written before, we then have the ludicrous spectacle of liberals, who believe that we are just clever apes, requiring us to live more like angels than the Church ever did.

B

Whites take vastly disproportionate responsibility for the world. Didn't we invent the silly idea of "humanitarianism?" Certainly a good part of that pathological altruism and its leapfrog morality is a greatly inflated sense of our own power and worth hiding underneath all the Lenten self-flagellation. Once you take a Christian conscience and erase the Christian God, you have to take His place as the One Responsible For Everything (the grandiose part) but since you are manifestly sinful flawed and limited, then you are in a perpetual state of repentance with no one to forgive you (the guilty part).

When foolish college girls run off to perform some saving work for Africans (in Africa, of course; Baltimore seems not to be on the exhibitionist menu), the underlying assumption is that she, as a privileged Caucasianette "global citizen", has something to offer them that they can't get by themselves. Her foreground motivation is guilt-inspired responsibility but the background belief is in her special snowflakeness.

There are many theories of the origins of this sad condition, but it does lead to the pathetic sight of highminded Whites traitorously competing for moral status by proclaiming and denouncing the sins of their people before a tribunal composed entirely of their envious and resentful enemies. Who the hell else would engage in such bizarrely suicidal antics? The Chinese? The Muslims? The Blacks? La Raza? Who?

Compartmentalization is, I think, a male specialty. For example, I am in a pretty good mood. It's a bit cooler than I'd like, but it's sunny. I have my nuclear-strength cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin at my side. So my mood is good.

My thoughts, however, are bloody. Perusing the "internets" --as Mr B's mom calls them-- I find the usual daily outrages chronicled. And my imagined forest of gallows adds new inhabitants. I discover new reasons each morning why it would be a cool idea to slowly strangle certain personages from lampposts. Or to drive certain groups into the sea, etc. But this does not always disturb my equanimity.

I don't think it's a sign of sociopathy. Sociopaths are famous for combining murderous mayhem with low blood pressure and steady brain wave activity. I think it's both a combo of natural male division of mind and a long spiritual practice.

Yes, ExC has a spiritual practice! When I was in college and I discovered CG Jung's concept of the shadow, I secretly substituted shadow meditation for the tedious Jesuit-style mental dramas that I was being taught to create twice-daily in the religious order I belonged to. I let myself become aware of the bloody-minded thoughts I carried, so that they would no longer frighten or horrify me. I learned to distinguish between the natural shadowy eruptions of a human psyche and the actual carrying out of the desires or fears that those images spoke for.

My favorite quote from Dr Jung

Consequently, I am a man whose imagination can easily entertain quite grisly scenarios, but who, when push comes to shove, is alas, ineffectual not a danger to anyone.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Well, you know, if that's true, then we need more of it and more education programs to make people --especially certain people-- get over their xenophic H8 and learn to trust strangers. The more alien the better!

Another fully enjoyable evening with Mr B. We've been doing our "unboyfriend" thing for almost eight years now and I still like him. And, amazingly, vice-versa. One of his many fine qualities is that he is very polite, especially in the "thank you" department. People of long familiarity sometimes drop all that. It never hurts to continue it. In fact, I read recently of one marriage therapist who assessed a couples' chance of making it by their level of politeness with each other.

We read the SF Chronicle at breakfast this morning. His daily ritual; I only see it when I'm visiting. The lingo and the issues and the slant, all as obvious as the noonday sun. These folks live in not only an ideological but a linguistic bubble. Mush for days, as far as the eye can see or ear hear.

While pulling out of the grocery store parking lot this morning, I apparently did not read the minds, such as they are, of two African-in-America chicks when I was slowly pulling out of my parking space. They graced me with their threat-glaring as they sashayed by, like fat sausages stuffed overtightly into day-glo tubes. All men are created equal? WTF was Thomas Jefferson thinking?

My experiment in renting out my car through the Getaround car-share program is going quite well. In two months, I have had the vehicle rented out all weekends, and a couple of weekdays. Only downs: One minor dent (for which the company paid me!) and one inconvenient jerk who left the lights on overnight and drained the battery. Otherwise, folks have been either very or reasonably responsible. I have to keep the car cleaner than I usually do. But I have taken in about eight hundred bucks! At this rate, owning it will cost me nothing and even make me some dough. Shows you the value of social capital...

It's a coolish morning, but the sun is out and the sky is blue and San Francisco, even after more than 20 years and despite its human craziness, is beautiful and calm and I don't miss the East Coast one little bit.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Contemporary Catholicism is as saturated with the pre-suppositions and mind-shaping values of Liberalism as Medieval Catholicism was with the pre-suppositions and mind-shaping values of feudalism.

Pope blessing his troops

Pope kissing Koran

Modern popes can no more imagine themselves declaring a crusade against the Muslims then the medieval ones would be capable of understanding the supine and craven appeasement of their successors towards Mohammed's soldiers.

The modern ones take the existence of the United Nations as a providential good just as much as the former ones naturally created The Holy League to destroy the Turks.

The traditional ones cared about triumph of the Faith and the Church, while the newer ones blather on blandly about "the universal dignity of the human person." And my favorite Catholic "social justice" bloviation: the preferential option for the poor. (Really, wtf is a "preferential option?")

The ancient popes assumed that being Roman Catholic and being European were virtually synonymous; these days their spiritual descendants are happily promoting the destruction of Europe by invasion from Africa and by the very Islam they used to resist, pitching it to us a duty and asking us to be happy about it.

Two female social science researchers have concluded that the "underrepresentation" of wymynz and Africans-in-America in high-demand academic fields is the result --surprise!-- of societal attitudes. These two groups are not generally expected to be "brilliant" by others and so they don't act brilliantly.

“Women and blacks... through exposure to culture that constantly tells them... that they do not have an aptitude for things like math and physics, have come to believe this is true.”

I beg to differ. Look at the Potemkin Village overrepresentation of galactically brilliant females and blacks in media, in TV and in movies. What's surprising is when you see one of them who isn't "brilliant."

Of course, being the evil H8er that he is, ExC suspects that somehow a combination of native talent and interest might account for this so-called "underrepresentation."

What are the rules for representation, by the way?

Do you have to match the numbers for a country, a city, an age group? By gender, by sexual orientation, my marital status, regional origin?

When Blacks are "overrepresented" in crime, this is an outrage and a scandal. (Imagine all the cells they are taking up that, by rights, belong to Whites and Asians!). But when Jews are "overrepresented" in law, medicine, government, finance, art, media, science...where's the screaming?

Sometimes these rules confuse me.

Maybe society never expected me to be "brilliant" enough to understand them.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Guy bumps into old girlfriend who left him years before without a word. He greets her warmly and compliments her. She asks if he's still mad. He admits that he is, a bit. Then...and this is the part I love...without showing the slightest sign of apology or responsibility, she criticizes him for being stuck in the past and not being willing to think that people can change.

Is that classic, or what?

BTW, in the plot, it turns out she actually tracked him down because he has information that can help her career.

The 2011 Williams Institute survey estimated the LGB and T US population at around 3%+/- altogether.

The T's were counted at .003% (And now they are the "newest Civil Rights frontier" in our bathrooms). Oh, and our language. Listen to the solemn tones of the Wall Street Journal on our desperate need to heal English's painful flaw, nay, oppressive crime, in lacking an inclusive 3rd person pronoun:

Lately, transgender issues have been driving the call for a more inclusive pronoun. The singular “they” avoids having to assign a static role to someone transitioning from one gender to another. And many who identify as transgender or “gender fluid” would prefer the use of the pronoun “they” rather than “he” or “she.”

Can you believe this crapola?

You better. Your Moral and Intellectual Superiors have decided the Narrative for you.

As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself...

The 2014 CDC last summer found 1.6% gay/lesbian and .07% bi.

Williams found a lot more Bi's.

In any case, about 2% of the population has managed to alter the structure of marriage to suit its leadership's agenda and helped the Left drive the free exercise of religion into a jail cell.

As with Jews --a similarly over-powerful and tiny slice of the pie-- and the Eternal Negroes of 12%+, who are The Centerpiece of American History, these aggrieved victims take up huge amounts of space in our culture. And wield outsized power, to their benefit, and the hell with the rest of society.

A big part of it is their tribal loyalty --which, say, heteros and Whites and males and Christians are absolutely forbidden even to allow themselves to consider because Crimethink!-- and their lobbhying organizations and their laser-like focus on the foolish modern West's Achilles heel (slavishly compassionate guilt/caring for hostile strangers whose feelings you have hurt, you nasty person), plus their concentration in big cities, where media and government are within easy reach and easily able to project a presence and importance all out of proportion to their numbers.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

I have come to the conclusion that nobody born after 1960 and raised "Catholic" has the slightest idea of what this 2000 year old religion is about. The "Vatican II" Catholics are not in any significant way different from contemporary Episcopalians.

The archbishop has had the gall to assert actual Catholic teaching rather than "pastorally" just going along with the flow. He describes things as "gravely evil" that are described in these words in, guess what, The Catechism of the Catholic Church. This makes him "divisive and intolerant" and the kids don't like him. He's not "true to our values and your namesake."

His crime: he's not a mirror of San Francisco culture. And as for someone like St Francis of Assisi, these folks have only a cartoonish and sentimental bird-bath notion of a really quite medieval and very Roman Catholic saint, one of whose constant attitudes was absolute compliance with the hierarchy. His famous Canticle of the Sun ends with the line "Woe to those who die in mortal sin!" He was galactically distant from Franco Zefirelli's hippie.

And among his other crimes, apparently His Grace turns a deaf ear to (notice the caps) "our Retired Priests."

How are these people different from a populist version of Henry VIII, who reduced the Church to a department of the civil government and English culture?

I may not practice the Faith anymore, but I sure as hell know what it is.

"...she touches the third rail in American politics, attacking the immigration issue head-on and flying in the face of La Raza, the Democrats, a media determined to cover up immigrants' crimes, churches that get paid by the government for their "charity," and greedy Republican businessmen and campaign consultants—all of whom are profiting handsomely from mass immigration that's tearing the country apart."

Charles Murray is about to call on Amurricans to engage in massive civil disobedience to a Federal government he deems completely and irrevocably out of Constitutional control. And to start a self-defense insurance fund to support the effort. Secession by non-compliance.

Libertarians are usually bright, at least in an instrumental way. But they lack all notion of culture, without which, politics is a truncated ideological mess. They are rationalist individualists to the core.

White Nationalist Richard Spencer gave an off-puttingly snide but essentially correct reading of post-War American conservatives in his speech at the most recent NPI meeting.

I roll my eyes now every time I hear a well-heeled Jew complain about the "Holocaust" or some Black politican whine about "the legacy of slavery." No more worth listening to than a Kennedy weeping over the Potato Famine, a Greek getting hysterical about the loss of Constantinople or some Muzzie pining over lost Al-Andalus.

It's not that I begrudge anyone their history. Elegiacs have their place, for sure. It's the attempt to get me to take some moral responsibility for it, much less care about it. As Mr B says to his manipulative students, "You're trying to turn your problem into my problem."

The decision of the churches to cast their lot with the invading Third Worlders and to abandon the tradititional peoples of Christendom has made me feel more alienated from Christianity than at any time since I left the Church back in the late 80's. The inability to accept homosexuality was just that, an inability. But promoting the demographic destruction of the West, that's been a choice.

Whenever I listen to or see some creepy Social Justice Warrior going on about their oppression, I fantasize creating a huge wall around places like Detroit (including Dearborn) and then dropping off all these worthless Caucasian pussies inside, to live out their dreams with all the victims they advocate for. And filming it.

Regardless of the issues with the study involved, the article is worth perusing simply for Mr Goad's pointing out that, contrary to the now canonical belief that rape is about power, not sex, “Sex and power aren’t discrete entities; if anything, they’re nearly synonymous.”

Feminists dream of some Platonic sexual world defined entirely by "mutuality."

Which lack of power-based conflict leads to the well-known fenomenon of Lesbian bed death.

In couples counseling, getting people to be honest about the power dynamics is very difficult, largely because of the current fantasy that the default stance of a twosome should be equality.

BS. Power operates constantly in all relationships. It is by design of nature, as inherent and inescapeable as eating and drinking, and only egalitarians (and love-blinded Christians or compassion-blinded Buddhists) have a problem with that.

Funny how Lefties, who are obsessed with power and how to get it, seem to get all ambivalent about it, as if you could have power that wasn't really power.

Monday, April 13, 2015

When the new post-American country comes into being, if it has any cities left in it, it should consider giving serious attention to the urban-suburban-rural power issue. In short, once a city attains a certain percentage of the population of a state, it becomes its own city-state. Otherwise, as in New York, one city renders the rest of the state practically powerless.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Though Liberal moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt asserts that Liberals only recognize one half of the spectrum of human moral concerns, --care, fairness and freedom--this is only true on the foreground and conscious level. In fact, just like conservatives, they do respond to the other three foundational elements of group loyalty, authoritative direction and protecting the sacred. Liberals are, in fact, as religious as conservatives, perhaps even more so. Liberalism is so ungrounded in logic or empirical evidence that it only makes sense as a dogmatically revealed tribal faith. Is it an accident that it has been created by apostate Christians and secular Jews? It's simply that they code their religion as a set of secular political ideas. Just like their Marxist cousins did. And their behavior, when viewed through the lens of religion, makes perfect sense. At least their Muslim cousins admit that.

Group loyalty: the conglomerate of victim groups and their success-group advocates forms the Liberal nation. Unlike the feckless Right, they rarely if ever engage in intra-group battles. The dogmatic dictum stands: No enemies to the Left. This sense of group loyalty explains their rabid hatred of individuals who, by rights, should be part of the Tribe of Justice, but betray their true nature by being Black Republicans or gay conservatives or female libertarians.

Authority: the Party Line of PC rules all. Once it is set, there is no dissent allowed. Gay marriage is a great example. Evolution on this issue, once tolerated, has now been banned. Failure to celebrate and privilege samesex marriage is an excommunication offense. Transgender rights, the "next civil rights frontier" is edging toward that status. Woe betide the treasonous and subversive H8er who fails to embrace the doctrine du jour once it is settled. Like the herd belief "settled science" on Global Warming Climate Change.

Sacredness: a single example will suffice to show that Lefty environmentalism is inundated with the sacredness/sacrilege element. A recent article suggested the people should stop climbing Mt Everest because they are leaving trash behind and thus wounding Mother Gaia. Consider, from a utilitarian POV, what actual harm can some trash do at a mountain peak where no animals live? Well, none, but it violates the sacredness of Pristine Nature, no? If this is not a religious objection to profanation of a holy place, I don't know what is.

The thing I hate about women like this is the thing that has always activated me most about the unfair sex: emotional lability, the rapid switch and change-up transition from one emotional state to its opposite, over and over. One minute she is a proud and competent adult equal exercising her power and the next she's a weepy ball of self-pity, crushed by some imaginary silliness.

Some straight men, I am told, find this kind of attractive. As the omegas among them have recently taken to saying, Wow. Like just, wow.

When women act like teenagers --this lability is classical adolescent stuff-- I think they should be treated like teenagers.

Which leads me to my current assessment of feminism and all the other spokes and pillars of Progress: that they're all deeply dishonest. The call for "justice" is nothing more than envy and resentment looking for revenge.

For once in his life, Francis the Talking Pope apparently had nothing to say.

And who knows, if another country, not led by an anti-Christian Socialist who was loudly pushing gay marriage, had quietly sent a diplomat who happened to be gay but made no fuss about it, it might have turned out differently.

The Telegraph article tries to let His Hipsterness off the hook a little by saying that "observers" think he had to placate "the conservative wing" after his airplane interview.

Just as they always let Obama and Hillary & Co. off the hook over their long refusal to "evolve" over gay marriage as merely strategic temporizing. Which, it turned out in their case, was precisely true.

Given Papa Bergoglio's general style, though, I doubt very much that he cares about placating anybody. Like most grandstanding men of the people, he is authoritarian to his Jesuit core.

As Professor Haidt has shown, traditional morality gives serious weight to traditional authority, group cohesion and loyalty, and to divine assertions of what is safely pure and dangerously impure, while the truncated ethics of the liberal West obsesses only about equality and oppression and care*. Different moral continents.

Part 2, if you're interested:

I made my peace with Catholic sexual morality when I realized that it was not about me. I certainly have my own selfishness and streaks of narcissism, but unlike the Sacred Victim Groups who populate the media and suck up vastly disproportionate amounts of cultural energy, I recognized that guys like me are a very tiny outlier minority. Awesome though we may be.

Catholicism's "No" to homosexual activity is an unavoidable but secondary, even tertiary, result of its prior fundamental commitments to issues of far more moment and importance, viz the sacrament of marriage and the family, and the binary gender structure of the human species. Long wed both to Scripture's focus on the male-female relation and to Western natural law philosophy, it lacks the tools to say "Yes," even if it wanted to.

And if it did, then its entire moral framework would unravel. It's no accident that Christian bodies who have, first, ordained women and, then, ordained active homosexuals and now, embrace genderless marriage had previously beveled the edges of their denominational identity, then their reading of Scripture and its authority, then their contra mundum Christian identity until liberal ideals --like a parasitic wasp or a retrovirus--had sucked it out entirely and replaced it with the fanatical devotion to a new trinity of sensitivity, inclusivity and diversity. As Jesus the Liberal might say of the sinful woman who anointed his feet in Luke 7, "Her sins, though many, are forgiven, for she is radically inclusive." Hence, my frequent description of them simply as Unitarians in drag.

Unless you are a liberal, you eventually realize that not every problem here below is solvable. As Ennis DelMar says in Brokeback Mountain, "If ya can't fix it, ya gotta stand it." I came to that painful conclusion about homosexuality within Christianity quite a while ago. I have recently arrived at a similarly resigned stance on racial matters. Just because I want a solution does not mean that there is one.

Now there are homosexuals who continue to practice their Catholic religion and do not suffer overmuch from their tradition's unwillingness/inability to accept their erotic nature. That is a personality type I admire but do not share. Whether it's a matter of preferring authenticity to prevarication, or being too rigid to adapt gracefully to the complexities of life, I don't know. But there it is.

Were I to look for a way to support someone in that situation, clearly gay but also deeply attached to Catholicism, I would suggest that because of the necessary limitations inherent in all systems of ethics, Catholicism's understandable laser-focus on marriage and family makes it very difficult for such a system to actually see "same-sex attracted" people fully and clearly. And on that basis I would suggest that such a person try to carve out --carefully-- a place for oneself within an unavoidably "myopic" moral tradition. (I have blogged about this before, but can't find the post at the moment.)

A lot of Christian gay readings of Scripture make a similar point, that what the ancient Jewish and Christian world knew of same-sex eros is only superficially like its contemporary shape. So the condemnation does not apply. That's a complex discussion, but I thought I should admit that I am aware of it and of its similarity to my "myopia" suggestion.

On the other hand, doing this carefully would require taking a critical stance toward LGBTism and gay culture as well. If Catholicism cannot see homosexuality clearly, gay-ism cannot really see anything but. The gay/LGBTQ thing is perhaps even more myopic, and almost completed embedded in and submerged by its liberal/progressive politics and culture. To perform the thankless task (thankless from both sides) of shaping a kind of active same-sex eros that shows respect for Catholicism and also dares to reject parts of gay-ism...well, that would be work for a saint.

Even paleoconservative Pat Buchanan will not allow himself to see the direct link between White acquiescence to the Black movement (aka 'The Civil Rights Movement') and all the other legal and cultural capitulations of what was America.

Thursday, April 09, 2015

Someone has nicely enunciated a razor-like law of discussion and thought, one which I have often found myself fruitlessly explaining, viz., the distinction between a general statement and a universal statement.

“When making general statements, it goes without saying that degrees, exceptions, outliers, and edge cases exist. It also goes without saying that the existence of these in no way invalidates statements that are true the overwhelming majority of the time. As such, when making general statements, there’s normally no real reason to bother bringing those things up.”

My favorite example of how this plays out in the typical mushy head was an exchange in a comments section

A writes: Every test measuring general intelligence shows that Blacks in the US have an average IQ of around 15 points lower than the White average.

B replies: Well, I have a Black neighbor who's an engineer and he's at least as smart as I am.

A responds: Good. Glad to hear it. Now go over to his house and ask him to explain to you the concept of "average."

Morality binds, and blinds. He values religion as allowing large groups of unrelated people to engage in community building.

Haidt's research into tens of thousands of people's responses to various questions creates the following three models showing the relative emphases given to the six foundations by US Liberals, Libertarians and Conservatives.

Apparently Libertarians are pretty much just Liberals without a heart...

Although, of course, I don't buy everything Professor Haidt is offering, I am glad to have read his work. And he sorta endeared himself to me when, a Liberal himself, he described the sometimes blind Liberal attitude toward "sacralized victim groups."

Tuesday, April 07, 2015

Monday, April 06, 2015

The conservatives who are (rightly) outraged at the gay wedding cake issue and Indiana, etc. do not want to draw the direct link --which liberals tout-- between anti-discrimination against Blacks, which all decent conservatives support, and any anti-discrimination law whatsoever, for any damn reason the State wants. There's a long straight line from the hallowed Civil Rights Act of 1964 to forcing Christian businesses to serve events that they reject on religious grounds. If you wanna praise one, you're gonna wind up with 'tother.

Christianity is redundant. Liberal democracy is the purer realization of the church, where the stranger is accepted, fed and taken care of so that he can reproduce. The church in the modern state is kind of an irritating vestigial leftover of a more primitive era.

Sunday, April 05, 2015

Oblivion's story is convoluted but the visuals are striking, worth seeing the film for. But if I never have to endure Morgan effing Freeman as The Numinous Negro ever again, it will be too soon. Retire!

That smooth and silky hot-fired rivulet in your mouth that brandy gives you. With the olfactory spread afterwards. Mmmm. Nice. Makes me wanna enjoy one of the birthday stogies my old friend T sent me.

Remembering Easters from my childhood. Easter baskets full of candy, baby chicks, new hats on Mom, dyeing eggs, the smell of lilies in church, leg of lamb for dinner and the coming of Spring after a robust winter on the East Coast.

Mr B's inquiries made me track down the details of why the Western and Eastern Churches celebrate Easter on different Sundays, since they both follow the rules of the 325 Council of Nicea, that it fall on the first Sunday following the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. Short answer: they both consider March 21 as the date of the equinox but March 21 falls on different days in the Gregorian and the Julian calendars.

I remember the Easter in Rome when I went to the Russicum for the Paschal Vigil and then walked the few miles home to Via Latina in the middle of the night and heard, for the first and only time, a nightingale singing in the dark woods behind the house.

And this Easter card from my late Dominican mentor CH, with his laughingly unromantic view of life:

Saturday, April 04, 2015

In moderately liberal Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, he conducts pretty large scale tests to determine how much Liberals and Conservatives can understand each other. The results are very lopsided.

He's pretty clear that Liberal morality not only emphasizes the first three but limits its moral imagination to them. Conservatives, although they give different colorings to the first three, see all six as important to morality.

The result of his tests show that while Conservatives can put themselves in the place of Liberals and accurately imagine that world, describing it in the same terms that Liberals do, Liberals fail badly at even being able to take the second triad of values as anything other than forms of evil.

This explains the failure of a lot of Left-Right "conversations".

As he goes on to point out, people live inside stories far more than they live inside intellectual propositions. Any therapist can tell you that. And the Left story and the Right story do not mesh.

Wednesday, April 01, 2015

His style is clear, chatty and autobiographical while being rigorously based on data and research. This tone is by design, as he points out. Since a major point of the book is that moral intuition is always prior to moral reasoning, he wants you to like him and feel that he is on your side so you can take in what he has to say without bolting. Unlike the icky Pastor Joel Osteen, Dr Haidt is upfront about this.

Using evolutionary theory and a lot of testing for his field of moral psychology, he discerns in all humans five foundations of morality. Although a liberal himself, he chastizes liberals for seeing and using only two, rejecting the other three. Conservatives use all five.

The five are care, fairness --the very White/Eurocentric Left's only moral interests (at least consciously)--, loyalty, authority and sanctity. With the exception of the modern Western Left, all other human moral systems are interested in all five fundamentals: not only condemning cruelty and injustice, but also betrayal, rebellion and sacrilege.

He later develops a sixth --liberty--but I am still reading so...Plus, you will note that despite his remarkable even-handedness, the listing implies that the Left's favorite conscious virtues, listed first, are most important.

My own take is that these foundations are indeed foundational and inescapeable. What liberals do is deny their own covert use of loyalty, authority and sanctity in their ethical world. As I have often said, the post-modern Progressives are a fundamentally religious movement, just as totalizingly theocratic and imperialistic as the patriarchal, violent, homophobic and dogmatic Muslims they so bizarrely defend and accomodate. Watch how Muslims react to an insult to Mohammed and how Progressives react when one of their Sacred Victim Groups is not reverenced.

Using other thinkers --and Haidt is very careful to give credit to others when it is their due-- he has a useful understanding of inherence in human nature, what Jungians consider archetypal. It is like a book of first drafts. The final story will differ from author to author, but no one starts out with a blank page. Like the six taste centers of the human tongue, the five moral centers in the human brain are inherent in the species, no matter what kind of moral cuisine you eventually develop a liking for.

Haidt and his partners in research are talented at presenting situations which provoke the underlying structure of moral reasoning, where intuition always precedes justification. It is especially amusing to listen to supposedly educated, articulate and enlightened Westerners stammer about their ethical assessments of brother/sister incest, fucking a supermarket chicken prior to cooking and eating it, or consensual cannibalism.

Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo

In A Nutshell

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's onlyjob is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.

Demography as Destiny

"...then the end of the Roman republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing." Theodore Roosevelt, 1911

Multiculti Suicide

"Modern liberal societies in Europe and North America* celebrate their own pluralism and multiculturalism, arguing in effect that their identity is to have no identity."

Francis Fukuyama

Identity & Migration (2007)

*(White societies, that is.)

Equality's Dark Side (Oops, is that raciss?)

"“The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced ... to a single principle.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835